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Archive for December, 2014

This is the Allsky1 Camera System running at SCGO since 2006 December (now 8 years old!) It is an ST237A SBIG

camera with an integrated wide angle lens mounted inside a wooden housing with a 14″ dome. Heaters had to be installed inside the dome to keep condensation from forming when the air cooled down at night. We use wire wound resistors at about 18 watts from a 24vdc source. In addition a circulation fan (a small 12vdc fan from a computer power supply) had to be installed as well.

Over time we have had some issues:

The 12vdc fans fail quite frequently. Bugs get inside the dome and leave “presents” on the lens. 18 watts is a lot of heat and the wood has scarred a bit. Birds would often rest on top of it and leave presents. Water sometimes gets inside. So we decided to do a renovation in the next few days. The internal flat black mask that sits over the lens to block out local light pollution often moves around (especially in high winds when the entire post moves a bit)

The housing and 14″ dome will be tossed, the camera will be mounted directly to the post, a smaller resistor will be mounted on top of the camera but out of the line of sight of the lens, a variable power source 4-12vdc will be used to power it, giving it maybe 1-4 watts of heating ability, and a smaller 4″ dome will be attached on top of the camera assembly.

So, we have a smaller footprint for birds not to sit on, a smaller area at the top especially, a much smaller volume of air to heat, much less wattage going into heating, no fans needed, and a newer better optical quality dome (after 8 + years, the dome is a bit grungy). If need be the heating resistor can be placed to block local neighbours lights.

over the last week. It was good because over the course of two years, it is easy to forget a lot of the detail I suspect we will need to know for the last installment. They were good albeit overly long. Goodness knows how long part 3 will be The Battle of the Five Armies.

Updated: 2014Dec19

well. we saw it.. opening night. in plain old 2D. The house was almost full and at the end a small scattering of applause… and not much else.

Generally it was ok, maybe even good. But not great. Disappointing in many ways. Overly long to be sure. Glaring subplots which could have been removed wholesale.

OK we saw it once. Maybe there will be a Directors Cut of the whole 3 movies pared down into just one movie of middl’n length.

The latest in the Linux Fedora distribution was released Tuesday, 2014 Dec 09.

It now comes in three major versions, workstation, server and the new cloud. Not sure what that is but what the heck. Progress!

We started with the most non-critical server and ran the internal upgrade process with:

fedup –network 21 –product=server

That ran for a short time, downloading a GB of so of files. A reboot followed by about 1 hour of installing and updating. Another reboot and Fedora 21 was up and running. Hmm. There seems to be an issue. Everyone on windows and imacs have lost file sharing to the server via samba.

Hmm.. a few hours of troubleshooting revealed two possible issues, one of which was the new firewalld process was active and blocking connections.

That was fixed with the command

firewall-cmd –add-service=samba

and firewall-cmd –list-services

to confirm what was allowed through.

The 2nd issue was that most client computers needed to have the static IP of the server put into their hosts files before the file sharing connections came back.

Still not sure why or if this was a side affect from the samba Domain Controller being updated.

And as of yet, have yet to try out some of the new Fedora 21 features, like cockpit. Sounds interesting.

There was a good turnout of 33 people in spite of the Annual General Meeting and Elections! It was also pot luck dinner night with door prizes!

Mary greeted everyone and we started in with the dinner first, before it got cold.
Afterward was the AGM: with minutes from last year read and approved. Financials were presented and then the elections started. That was over quickly and we got to the door prizes. These were brought in and donated by members and we ended up with more prizes than people present!

The OHA District 3 Award went to us for the Community Food Bank Garden project, and was presented by D3 Leader Penny.